THE SLAVES OF LIBERTY: FREEDOM IN AMITE COUNTY,
              MISSISSIPPI, 1820-1868

              SMITH, DALE EDWYNA

              HARVARD UNIVERSITY

              PHD

              1993

              DAI-A 54/06, p. 2300, Dec 1993

              424

              HISTORY, UNITED STATES (0337); HISTORY, BLACK (0328);
              AMERICAN STUDIES (0323)
 
 
 

              Amite County, Mississippi, was host to a black slave majority
              population. Cotton was the principal crop, with large plantation
              holdings the rule. It is an ideal site for a challenge to a traditional view
              of American race slavery that a paternalistic ethos, based upon an
              awareness of mutual obligation between black slave and white slave
              owner, resulted in certain 'rights' for slaves whereby freedom of a
              sort was routinely negotiated. Support for this view is cleaved by
              gender: certain feminist scholars agree that paternalism might have
              been a useful tactic of white male slaveholders, but insist that white
              women slave owners were guided by feminine or maternal empathy
              with the slaves' position of powerlessness. The axiom that white
              liberty was dependent upon race slavery is also critical here, though
              evidence suggests that whites became, over time, enslaved both to
              this idea and to their own peculiar institution. Theological purity,
              artistic creativity, legal and economic concerns were all subsumed by
              the perceived necessity to contain the black population, and at a
              distance from the white population. Thus, by building an impenetrable
              wall around the county's blacks, the white population, seemingly
              oblivious, walled itself in as well. Evidence gleaned from an
              examination of extant materials do not support a theory of
              paternalistic interaction and reasoned compromise. Rather, surviving
              documents reveal a system wherein white women followed no
              distinguishable agenda, but were in remarkable agreement with men
              who exerted themselves to fashion a system of absolute physical,
              mental, and, it was hoped, spiritual control of black slaves. Black
              family, religious, and community life survived in spite of, rather than
              with the patronage of white slaveholders. And infrequent, albeit
              extraordinary, breaches of community and legal propriety made a
              mockery of both the idea that black slavery ensured white liberty or
              that 'freedom'--by any reasonable definition--might be achieved by
              any segment of a society based upon the deliberate deprivation of the
              freedom of one particular racial group.